The War Against Women and The Violence Against Women Act — I want to be charitable and believe that the Republicans who spent the summer dismantling legislation that helps thousands of abused women and children, that the GOP who spent the summer saying the stupidest victim blaming Rape crap imaginable, don’t actually hate women. I imagine that they have wives and daughters that they love. I really do think that they don’t actually want women to be raped or battered. But if this is the case, then I’m really failing to understand why they do things like this. Because that's what conservatives do, duh. The modern Republican party doesn't stand for anything except political vandalism in the name of self-valorizing paranoia, which GOP political and media strategists have been carefully nurturing for decades in the name of generating more angry white guys so the GOP could stay in business. (Their own words, not my liberal snark, hence the link.) Witness the recent Senate vote on the disability rights treaty. Like gun owners, these vandals consider themselves moral people and patriotic Americans. That self-image doesn't mean their delusions of ethics are any less destructive or morally bankrupt.

Second amendment supporters strolled through SE Portland neighborhood with assault rifles, police say — Further demonstrating the finely honed sense of social responsibility found in gun owners. After all, if 80 deaths a day are perfectly acceptable to the upright moral citizens who constitute America's gun culture, what's wrong with spreading a little panic to make your point? In a neighborhood close to mine, by the way, and not far from the recent Clackamas mall shootings, no less. So proud of my fellow Oregonians for their theoretical defense of their essential liberties.

8,775 Firearm Murders a Year in US, Equiv. of 290 in UK — The international comparisons show conclusively that fewer gun owners among civilians per capita produce not only fewer murders by firearm, but fewer murders per capita over all. Yet bizarre;y, most US gun owners consider themselves moral people and good citizens, despite being primary enablers of the slaughter of thousands of their fellow citizens by supporting the gun culture as it were somehow a social good for which all those deaths are a worthy price paid.

Why I'm giving up my guns — While Piers Morgan and Alex Jones were having a gun control debate on CNN, I was having my own internal debate. I am an avid hunter, but the tragedy in Newtown, Conn. made me realize that as a gun-owner, I am unwittingly abetting the narrative of American violence. Slowly, a few gun owners are awakening to the fundamental immorality and horror that they enable by being part of gun culture. This is what most of us will eventually feel, when our society matures to the point that widespread violence is viewed with the same historical distaste as institutionalized racism and gender discrimination.

The response has been moving. On Twitter, on Facebook, in the blogosphere. The Waterloo Productions Kickstarter has made 95% of goal in its first day. The informal donations Fred kicked off are going into the same fund for the genetic testing, and have been generous. People are amazing. Old, close friends have contributed, as have total strangers.

I sometimes say I walk this cancer journey alone. In a strictly medical sense this is true, as no one else can take my treatments for me, and no one else can absorb my ever-mounting mortality risks. But it's also true that I walk this journey hand in hand with thousands of people.

I said yesterday I'll never get to heaven. That was mostly me making an atheist wise crack. But all of you are helping me remember that Sartre was wrong. Heaven is other people.